TransEd still confident in Bombardier as partner says Mayor

What happened in Ontario with Bombardier has led to a flurry of phone calls at Edmonton City Hall to make sure everything is still okay with the Valley Line LRT. In Ontario, the provincial transit agency there has filed a notice of intent to cancel a nearly three-quarter billion dollar contact for Bombardier to supply Toronto it’s light rail vehicles.

“I know our corporate leadership team, and Linda (Cochrane, the city manager) and myself are all watching this project very closely,” Mayor Don Iveson told reporters. “So far it’s going very very well.”

“I have reached out to them through the city manager to get assurance from them in no uncertain terms that they remain confident in all aspects of their team. Their answer to me through the city manager is that yes they’re still confident.”

And the mayor expects it to stay that way, because of how the contract with TransEd has been drawn up. “If they start to think that they may miss some of those milestones that would be extremely expensive for them,” Iveson said.

That’s because the consortium partners are all in this together. “There’s finance partners, design partners, construction partners, rolling stock partners, operations partners, and none of them get paid if the system doesn’t open on time and so every single one of the partners will be looking at every single one of the other partners and going, ‘you’re not to mess this up for us, are you?'”

“Bombardier is a partner in TransEd and everything is on schedule for the Valley Line LRT. The Toronto project is completely unrelated to the Valley Line project, and we wouldn’t comment on any projects in other jurisdictions,” said TransEd spokeswoman Sue Heuman of Focus Communications.

Iveson said time is still on their side. Opening day is still four years away.

This P-3 model for the Valley Line differs from the Metro Line which was managed all in house. The construction of the Metro Line, and delivery of the rolling stock was all done below budget and ahead of schedule. However the signaling system is what continues to plague performance, nearly two years after the original opening date.